The City of Edinburgh will be the first to host an international promotion event of Rotterdam's innovative cultural policies for enforcing the participation of artists in heightening a city's competitiveness and securing social peace on the local level.

The essay 'Neo-Liberalism with Dutch Characteristics: The Big Fix-Up of the Netherlands and the Practice of Embedded Cultural Activism' is published in the book volume 'Culture and Contestation in the New Century'.

Read more about the Kanunnik Triest Square (designed by architects De Vylder Vinck Taillieu) in the Caritas psychiatric centre (Melle) and how it results from a participative process with psychiatrists, managers, staff, and patients.

Lecture: Sessions

BAVO will give a presentation in Johannesburg on contemporary urban activism in the Netherlands.

The lecture is part of the 'Sessions' series organised by the Johannesburg based architecture office 26'10" South Architects.

With the title: 'Letters From Afar: Urban Activism with Dutch Characteristics', BAVO's lecture will deal with recent actions and projects by architects and designers in the context of the on-goin restructuring of so-called problem neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. This will serve as background for a discussion of the recent upsurge of urban activism in South Africa in relation to similar social housing projects.

The lecture will take place on Thursday 23 October, in the office of 26'10" South Architects 14th Street, 25A, Vredesdorp, Johannesburg.

Short description lecture:

The Netherlands has long enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most progressive countries on the level of spatial planning and policy. Of late however, it has given itself over to the more general, global trend of a neo-liberal and neo-conservative style urban politics. One can think here of the liberalization of social housing, special social and spatial policies to attract and privilege high income groups and the new knowledge aristocracy to the cities, toughened urban regimes for people from foreign origin or the working poor.

In response to these developments and the social upheaval caused by it, architects, artists and planners in the Netherlands have again assumed activist positions and initiated projects around such problems as the increasing lack of service delivery, the destitution of the victims of the neo-liberal restructuring of social housing, the democratic deficit of urban development an so on. More often than not, however, this new round of urban activism has not been able or even willing to radically contest the worrying urban trends. On the contrary, it often paradoxically combines a highly creative and innovative attitude with a conformism towards the deeper logics of the urban processes at play, prompting one commentator to speak of the recent architectural activism as a ‘fresh conservatism’.